The Mistresses Collection. Оливия Гейтс

didn’t work. His wife left him. She took his child. He lost everything.”

      “He hasn’t lost you.”

      Ivan didn’t know what twisted in him, rolling over like an earthquake, shaking things loose that he hadn’t known could move. For a moment he thought the whole world shifted—this was California, after all—but Miranda still stood there, looking up at him, so pretty in something flowing and red that teased over her body to skim her thighs. So it was only him, and he didn’t know what that meant, or how to handle it.

      “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, because he had no idea what was happening, and trying to cram it back down where it belonged seemed like the best course of action. “It’s my fault he was put in the position of having to make those decisions. If I’d stayed—”

      “You would have had to make the same decisions that he did,” she interrupted him with a shrug. “Just as he could have followed your example, presumably. If he didn’t, that’s sad, but it’s not your fault.”

      Ivan said nothing. He was, he thought in some astonishment, incapable of speech. That thing in him shook harder. Seismic overload, turning everything to rubble. Cities collapsing. Landscapes changing. He was surprised he didn’t fall to the ground.

      Miranda looked at him, then frowned in concern. She reached over and put her hand on his arm, and he had the strangest sensation, then—that this small, slight woman was holding him up. That she could carry him, if she wanted. If he let her.

      “Ivan,” she said gently. Insistently, her gaze never leaving his, and causing, he realized, the same kind of trouble all through him. He should have taken precautions. He should have listened to his brother. He should have paid more attention to what she was doing to him—because now, he was very much afraid, it was far too late. “You do know that, don’t you?”

      The red carpet for Ivan’s Jonas Dark premiere didn’t overwhelm Miranda this time. She didn’t care about the cameras. She didn’t care about the roar of the crowd or the attempts at intrusive questions. She was aware of nothing but Ivan. She saw the way he looked at her that was only theirs. All of the stories he’d told her, all the ways he’d shared himself, as if he wanted to be as open to her as she was to him … It made her imagine he was not as alone as he sometimes seemed.

      Or that she wasn’t.

      She was dressed in the shimmering blue dress she’d worn as little more than fabric in that dressing room in Paris. It clung to her breasts and then fell like water to the floor, reminding her somehow of the sea. The back was a wide V, allowing him to brush her skin with his fingertips whenever he liked, catapulting them both back to Paris. To what could have been.

      “Do you know what I wanted to do to you the last time you wore this?” he asked, murmuring into her ear as they entered the theater.

      “I wanted you to do it,” she told him, smiling. “I dreamed about it for nights on end.”

      “Lucky for you this is Hollywood,” he replied, that fire in dark gaze. “Where all your wildest dreams can come true.”

      And he was as good as his word.

      He didn’t wait for them to go back to his Malibu house. The moment they entered the limousine that was to take them from the premiere to the after-party, he pulled her to him.

      “No kissing,” he told her sternly, making her melt with the heat lurking in his voice and gleaming in his gaze. “We have to look presentable.”

      He simply picked her up and settled her over his lap. He moved her skirts out of the way, and pulled her panties to the side as he worked his own fly. And then, his hands deliciously hard on her hips, he thrust deep into her, made them both sigh with that sheer, dizzying pleasure that was only theirs.

      Only him, she thought. Only Ivan.

      He gazed up at her then, and showed her that smile that she understood then that she would do anything to see. Anything at all. Especially this.

      “You’ll have to do all the work.” It was a dare. A challenge.

      And she met it.

      The car slid through the streets of Hollywood. Miranda could see lights, other cars, city life clogging the roads and surging up and down the sidewalks—and all the while, Ivan was so hard beneath her and inside of her. So deliciously hard. She reached up and braced on hand against the roof of the car, and the other on his shoulder. And then she began to move.

      It was so good. It felt like glory and wild, slick heat, perfect and impossible all at once.

      She moved faster, making him groan. He let his head fall back against the seat and she watched him as she rocked against him, into him, circling her hips instinctively, finding the best fit, the hottest angle. He was so fierce, so intensely masculine, so ruthlessly physical, even with his eyes closed. Even as he let her take some kind of control. It made her feel wild with a new kind of power, incandescent with it. With him. Like she was made to do this. Like it made her new, and strong. That she could reduce this tough, hard man to nothing more than need.

      That she could make him come.

      And then fling herself over the edge behind him, knowing he would be there on the other side of all of this wildness to catch her, every time.

      She had originally intended to go back to New York after the premiere, to wait out her time between Ivan’s events in the comfort and privacy of her own home. But after the premiere, sometime so far into the night that it was already the next morning, she woke to find him holding her close, his face buried against her neck.

      “What’s the matter?” she asked, her hands going to his face, his back.

      But he didn’t answer.

      He entered her slowly. As if it was sacred. He moved like liquid; gentle, inexorable. He loved her with his mouth, his hands, making her writhe beneath him in that same quiet, shattering way. As if he was imprinting himself on her—making her his as surely as if he’d branded her. Because she understood that there was no way she would ever survive this—him—intact. No way she could even attempt it.

      And when he lifted his face to hers, she could see that he wanted that.

      As if this was his way of saying the things that couldn’t be said.

      This beautiful, impossible wave of sensation, pulling them both up and then crashing them down, until they collapsed against each other, tangled and breathless, wrapped up in his bed like they were a knot that could never be untied.

      And so she didn’t leave for New York the next day, as she’d planned. She just … stayed. And promised herself she’d love him as long as he’d let her.

      One afternoon she sat on one of the terraces and watched as Ivan and his brother trained in their deadly sport on that bluff high above the sea. She’d wrapped herself in one of Ivan’s button-down shirts, letting herself indulge in the sensation of being held by him when he wasn’t near her. She’d woken from the usual daze he’d left her in to find him gone from his bed, and had followed the odd sounds on the breeze to this terrace.

      She knew she should be disgusted. Appalled. But she wasn’t.

      It didn’t look like jocks gone wrong. It didn’t look like cavemen. It looked like some kind of beautiful, lethal dance. Art on the edge of a blade. They circled each other, came together, flipped and kicked and rolled. They were like two titans, all muscle and grace, and she was most struck by the identical expressions on their hard, Korovin faces.

      That fierce concentration. That deadly intent.

      And the joy.

      Pure and unadulterated.

      Miranda found herself swallowing, hard, against a lump in her throat. She had to look away. She didn’t have to be told that these were men for whom joy was an intellectual exercise, not a fact. Not something they’d experienced much of—but they experienced it here. In the